Tuesday, February 10, 2015

We do not post much on politics or religion because we think it is extremely difficult to change anyone's mind about political or religious questions. The best thing one can do, we have found, is simply to pose thoughtful questions. Two such questions surfaced in studying Territorial Acquisition by the USA as a reference for land survey and for current land disputes worldwide:

Are War and Armed Conflict Sane Solutions to Territorial Disputes?

Comment: Historically, in terms of the territorial integrity of peoples, war and armed conflict have been very UNSUCCESSFUL methods in the long-term, so that most nations of the Old World, for example, are still populated by the very same groups of people who populated them millennia ago. So, why war? why armed conflict? when contracts suffice?

Is the Purchase of Disputed Land a More Sensible Solution? The USA is an example: Louisiana Purchase, Alaska Purchase, etc. Here is a map of U.S. Territorial Acquisitions from Wikimedia Commons:

Page URL: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AU.S._Territorial_Acquisitions.pngFile URL: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/U.S._Territorial_Acquisitions.pngAttribution: By United States federal government (en:User:Black and White converted it from JPEG to PNG and retouched it) (National Atlas of the United States [1]) [Public domain], <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AU.S._Territorial_Acquisitions.png">via Wikimedia Commons</a>

Comment: Having once worked for the State Surveyor's Office of Nebraska, and now posting often about ancient land survey, maps and cartography, it still remains a marvelous revelation that a large share of the United States was purchasedoutright or obtained by treaty and payment of compensation to stop or reduce war or armed conflict. Without going into the question of the purchase or taking of Indian lands (Native American lands) per se, let us look at some famous purchases:

It DOUBLED the size of the United States, and, as written at History.com:

"President Thomas Jefferson commissioned the Corps of Discovery Expedition (1804-06), led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, to explore the territory acquired in the Louisiana Purchase, among other objectives."

"With the defeat of its army and the fall of the capital, Mexico City, in September 1847 the Mexican government surrendered to the United States and entered into negotiations to end the war....

"Under the terms of the treaty negotiated by [Nicholas] Trist, Mexico ceded to the United States Upper California and New Mexico. This was known as the Mexican Cession and included present-day Arizona and New Mexico and parts of Utah, Nevada, and Colorado (see Article V of the treaty). Mexico relinquished all claims to Texas and recognized the Rio Grande as the southern boundary with the United States (see Article V).

The United States paid Mexico $15,000,000 "in consideration of the extension acquired by the boundaries of the United States" (see Article XII of the treaty) and agreed to pay American citizens debts owed to them by the Mexican government (see Article XV). Other provisions included protection of property and civil rights of Mexican nationals living within the new boundaries of the United States (see Articles VIII and IX), the promise of the United States to police its boundaries (see Article XI), and compulsory arbitration of future disputes between the two countries (see Article XXI)."

[and, as for ancient surveying practices]

To carry the treaty into effect, commissioner Colonel Jon Weller and surveyor Andrew Grey were appointed by the United States government and General Pedro Conde and Sr. Jose Illarregui were appointed by the Mexican government to survey and set the boundary. A subsequent treaty of December 30, 1853, altered the border from the initial one by adding 47 more boundary markers to the original six. Of the 53 markers, the majority were rude piles of stones; a few were of durable character with proper inscriptions."

The Gadsden Purchase in 1853 more or less finalized the continental boundaries of the United States: As written at historytoday.com:

"The Mexican regime was urgently in need of money and for $10 million sold the required strip of territory south of the Gila River, in what is now southern New Mexico and Arizona. It was only a mere 30,000 square miles, about the size of Scotland, but it was the country through which the Southern Pacific Railroad would be built."

"On March 30, 1867, the United States reached an agreement to purchase Alaska from Russia for a price of $7.2 million. The Treaty with Russia was negotiated and signed by Secretary of State William Seward and Russian Minister to the United States Edouard de Stoeckl."

This gender area of Constitutional Law is not one of our interests as such, but the main legal rationale is simply that you cannot have a nation with differing recognition of marriage in the various States. Either there is no recognition or there is 100% recognition throughout the country. Anything else is chaos.

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Responsible for Blog Content: Verantwortlich für den Inhalt:(required by German Law):Andis KaulinsGartenstrasse 1056841 Traben-TrarbachGermanyContact: first and last name dot-separated at gmail dot com

Both volumes have the same cover except for the labels "Volume 1" viz. "Volume 2".The image on the cover was created using public domain space photos of Earth from NASA.

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Both book volumes contain the following basic book description:"Alice Cunningham Fletcher observed in her 1902 publication in the American Anthropologistthat there is ample evidence that some ancient cultures in Native America,e.g. the Pawnee in Nebraska, geographically located their villages according to patterns seen in stars of the heavens.See Alice C. Fletcher, Star Cult Among the Pawnee--A Preliminary Report,American Anthropologist, 4, 730-736, 1902.Ralph N. Buckstaff wrote:"These Indians recognized the constellations as we do, also the important stars,drawing them according to their magnitude.The groups were placed with a great deal of thought and care and show long study. ... They were keen observers....The Pawnee Indians must have had a knowledge of astronomycomparable to that of the early white men."See Ralph N. Buckstaff, Stars and Constellations of a Pawnee Sky Map,American Anthropologist, Vol. 29, Nr. 2, April-June 1927, pp. 279-285, 1927.In our book, we take these observations one level furtherand show that megalithic sites and petroglyphic rock carvingand pictographic rock art in Native America,together with mounds and earthworks, were made to represent territorial geographic landmarksplaced according to the stars of the sky using the ready map of the starry skyin the hermetic tradition, "as above, so below".That mirror image of the heavens on terrestrial land is the "Sky Earth" of Native America,whose "rock stars" are the real stars of the heavens,"immortalized" by rock art petroglyphs, pictographs,cave paintings, earthworks and mounds of various kinds (stone, earth, shells) on our Earth.These landmarks were placed systematicallyin North America, Central America (Meso-America) and South Americaand can to a large degree be reconstructed as the Sky Earth of Native America."